Charmed Thirds (6 page)

When all the important issues had been covered and I was floating about a foot off the ground because of the mass exodus of brain cells from my cerebellum, Sara asked The New Question. If you recall, The Old Question, asked by teachers, friends’ parents, and grocery store check-out clerks alike was, “What school do you want to go to?” The New Question is, of course, “How’s school?”

Last winter break, when I inevitably collided with former classmates, I got used to answering the The New Question with a smile and an upbeat, “It’s awesome.” And the inquisitor would beam and say, “Cool!” and move on, having no clue that I’d used a word that I always use when I never mean it.

I was inspired by Marcus, who would answer The New Question with a note of genuine intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. (“Gakkai students and faculty are unified by our commitment to becoming global citizens.”) I admired Bridget, who replied with lackluster candor. (“
UCLA
is okay, but I miss Percy.”) I could relate to Len’s somewhat disaffected pragmatism. (“Cornell is stressful. But. Um. Good for my career.”) I was unmoved by Manda’s claim of academic rigor. (“There’s no way Columbia is
that
much harder than Rutgers. Puh-leeze!”) I was unsurprised by the simple truths from Scotty. (“We party so hard at Lehigh!”) And Sara. (“Omigod! We party so hard at Harrington!”) Finally, I outright envied Hope, who could answer The New Question with unbridled enthusiasm. (“I love RISD! It’s changed my whole concept of creativity! Plus, there’re a lot of really hot artsy guys.”)

But for me, the truth has always been far more complicated than the boundaries of small talk permit, even when the listener is actually interested in hearing what I have to say, unlike Sara, who is only interested in her own adenoidal drone. If I had the time, and the right audience, I might explain that Columbia would be awesome if I were the type of person who could embrace awesomeness. But I’m not. I’m certainly happier than I was at Pineville, but it’s hardly perfect. I’ve learned not to complain, though, because it’s obviously selfish and ridiculous to complain about attending one of the best educational institutions in the world.

However, less obvious is how selfish and ridiculous it is to complain about one of the worst educational institutions in, if not the world, then New Jersey. Aka Pineville High School.

I found this out the hard way.

Early in the year, when everyone on my floor was still in the getting-to-know-you phase, a few of us had gathered in the lounge to play Who Hated High School the Most? Tanu hated high school because she was the only Indian girl in school. That’s Southeast Asian Indian, not Native American Indian, which is why her nickname, “Tonto,” was doubly cruel. William, one of the members of F-Unit, hated high school in Texas because he was the only pasty-faced punk in a school full of preppy cowboys. Jane hated high school because she got drunk at the wrong party as a freshman and was rumored to have fucked half the football team. It was a false accusation—she had blown
one
of them—yet she still spent the next three years hearing “Ride the Jane Train!”

So when it was my turn I said, “High school was torture after my best friend, Hope, moved away.”

“I have no sympathy for you, Darling, Jessica,” said William, pausing to tongue the ring in his bottom lip. “I know all about your so-called tortured past.”

“You do?”

“I Googled you.”

“You Googled me? Why?”

“I Google everyone I meet,” he said.

“That’s neurotic,” I said.

“That’s
smart,”
he responded. “We should all know about the company we keep. Of course, with you, Darling, Jessica, I had to get through about 150,000 porn sites first.”

This is true. Go ahead and Google me. And the result is what happens when you share a name with a porn star whose film credits include
Grand Theft Anal, Weapons of Ass Destruction,
and, of course, the celebrated
Booty Duty,
Parts One and Three. (Which of course begs the question, was the script for Part Two not up to her high standards?)

“Eventually, I found local newspaper articles about how you were this big track star, and about your involvement in student council and all those other rah-rah activities for popular people.”

“Did you find anything about how I hated all my popular friends because they were dumb and slutty?”

“So you
were
in the popular crowd,” Tanu said accusingly.

“Well, sort of, but no, not really,” I stammered. “I really hated them.”

“But did anyone hate
you?”
asked William. “Did anyone throw garbage at
you
in the cafeteria?”

No matter how I tried to explain it, my high school years came off all wrong, in that they seemed all right. I was lusted after by the most popular meathead jock in our class. I had a boyfriend for several months, a hot one who was also smart enough to beat me out for valedictorian and get into Cornell. True, he dumped me, but it freed me up to be with my first real love, a former sex and drug addict genius who says I changed his life, one who wrote poetry and sang love songs. . . .

“If you don’t mind me saying,” Jane said. “It sounds like you lived a goddamned charmed life to me.”

Everyone else nodded in agreement.

“So shut up about it.”

I admired Jane’s bluntness. No wonder she became my best friend at school.

I’ve always known that my high school experience was only terrible because something inside me—my mucked-up brain chemistry, most likely—made me feel that way. So I was a bit surprised when being on the football field just one year after my own high school graduation made me strangely nostalgic for a time that I know is not worthy of such reverence.

The déjà voodoo really hit me when I saw Taryn Baker, stepsister of the former gay man of my dreams and current peer at Columbia University, Paul Parlipiano. I’d forgotten that Taryn was also graduating today.

“Heard any good gossip lately?” she asked.

Taryn had e-mailed me a few times last year, but I hadn’t seen or talked to her since I graduated. So I barely recognized the voice, or the person who went with it. Gone was the mousy whisper, replaced by a Marlboro red pack rasp, and her hemophilic paleness served as an unnerving backdrop for a female faux hawk that was tarlike both in color and texture. Now she’s a pinup punkette just daring people to ignore her. But when I tutored her in math as a sophomore and junior, she was a fade-into-the-paint wallflower. Taryn was so easily missed that she was often witness to shady behavior, which she eventually put to her advantage. Inspired by my own critical editorials in the school newspaper, and fed up with her outsider status, she launched
Pinevile Low,
an anonymous e-mail gossip rag devoted to the school’s dirtiest hookups, breakups, and fuckups. No one was safe from her scrutiny—not even me. (To this day, she’s the only one who knows that I once helped Marcus fake a drug test by peeing into an empty yogurt container.)

While revealing herself as the mystery muckraker didn’t launch her into the Upper Crust, it did make her a bit of a hero among Pineville’s most unappreciated subcultures. She had no problem persuading a band of misfit wordsmiths to join her on
The Seagull’s Voice
staff, making the school paper
the
cool activity for the uncool. She’d even improved her grades to the point that she could get accepted by Loyola in New Orleans. I was proud to have served as her inspiration.

“Well,
you’re
the eyes and ears around here,” I replied. “What have you got for me?”

“Hm,” she said, tapping a black fingernail against her chin. “What former Most Likely to Succeed has fallen on hard times and graced Pineville High with her superior, Ivy League presence?”

“Har dee har har,” I said. “Is Paul here?”

“Don’t you know?” she replied. “He ditched
PACO
. He’s in New Hampshire organizing meet-ups for Howard Dean.”

I’d had several hello/good-byes with Paul at Columbia, but little beyond it. His former group, People Against Conformity and Oppression, had a lot of campus protests this year—against the climate of racism and intolerance, the mistreatment of TAs, the lack of vegan entrées served in John Jay, and so on. I didn’t get involved with those fights against injustice, but I did join Paul and millions of others across the globe in the all-time largest antiwar demonstration. This, of course, proved to be less successful than the campaign against the dining hall, which now serves wheatless, meatless soy-cheeze pizzas nightly.

Every time I saw Paul, he had a picket sign in one hand and Luis’s hand in the other. Paul was never without this new boyfriend—who is Latino and muscular and painfully gorgeous. Paul was my high school crush-to-end-all-crushes, so this was not easy for me to get used to, which is totally stupid because—
HELLO
, DOLLY!—he’s gay. Anyway, Paul and I were always shouting promises to hang out across the campus, but never did. The point is, I had no idea that he had left the extremely unfocused
PACO
to channel his activist energies into something so specific.

Before I could express my surprise, Principal Masters’s voice rumbled from the loudspeakers, reminding all graduates that they were needed in the auditorium at once.

“The evil one calls for the last time,” Taryn said. “I’ll send you my final issue of
The Seagull’s Voice.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to see what you did.”

“Our op-ed columnist was even better than you were,” she bragged. “No offense.”

And I assured her that none was taken. As an about-to-graduate senior in high school, Taryn’s got hubris out the wazoo. And that’s okay, because I was exactly like her just one year ago. I watched her and Pepe and the rest of the Class of 2003 strut across the stage and giddily grab their diplomas out of Principal Masters’s hand, and I envied them. I wanted their confidence, their excitement, and their anticipation of the next step. I think about my salutatory address last June, in which I told a football field full of people that I was happy being me, yes, me . . . and it makes me cringe. Where did I get off being so confident?

I didn’t know anything about
anything.
And the only difference between then and now is this: I may know more than I used to, but my wisdom pales in comparison to that which I’ve yet to learn. I assume this is what Professor Samuel MacDougall—the instructor from the summer writing program I attended before my senior year—had in mind when he quoted Confucius in my letter of recommendation for Columbia: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s own ignorance.”

Well, in that regard, I have surely exceeded my mentor’s expectations.

the twenty-eighth

Tonight was our last night together before I take the two-and-a-half-hour trip to New York for my internship at
True.
Marcus and I thought about getting out and doing something that would inspire highly intellectual banter, but instead we stayed in and did some bang-a-langin’.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Using Sara’s word helps keep me in a state of ironic detachment about my life. It’s where I often place myself when I’d rather not feel real.

“Maybe I shouldn’t do this
True
thing after all,” I said, tracing the thin lines that bracket his mouth like parentheses. “I don’t know if I can handle living with Bethany and G-Money for a month.”

“Think of all the quality time you’ll get to spend with Marin,” Marcus said.

“I’ve got two more summers to pad my résumé,” I said. “And I’m not even sure I’m all that into publishing.”

“That’s the point of an internship, to find out if it’s something that you’d like to do for a living,” he said, pushing my bangs off my forehead with his fingertips. It was a gesture that was supposed to let me know that he didn’t care about my hair, but it made me feel more self-conscious about it than ever.

“Stop,” I complained, flicking his hand away from my face.

He rubbed his temples. “Stop pretending this has nothing to do with me.”

Total body clench. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t want to be the type of girl who doesn’t do things because of her boyfriend. But I’m the only reason you don’t want to go.”

Marcus placed his hands on my shoulders and gently kneaded my defenses right out of me.

“You’re right,” I admitted. “I don’t want to be that girl. I hate that girl. But I hate being away from you even more. So why don’t I spend this summer with you? We’ve never been able to spend more than a few weeks together before being separated . . .”

Marcus laid placidly in the pillows, waiting for me to finish before asking, “Why do you want to do this internship?”

I thought about it for a moment. And then I told him.

True
is the only magazine for women that is satirical and irreverent and funny about the types of things that I really think about. It’s
Cosmo
with a brain cell.
Bust
without the in-your-face feminism.
The Onion
with ovaries. As a free publication only available on the coasts and nowhere in between, its marketing strategy reflects an inclusive yet elitist worldview that I can relate to.

True
devotes each issue to a single topic. The first I ever saw was
True on Computers.
On the cover was a photo from the early sixties of a bunch of scientists with crew cuts in horn-rims and lab coats examining data on a floor-to-ceiling-sized machine. What sucked me in was an essay about the tyranny of IM, how it’s not just the content of the message that’s being scrutinized, but the message behind the message, and how responding too quickly or too slowly or two long or too short can destroy an otherwise solid relationship. There was a page of blog reviews, all comprised of minutiae (“kings of leon are sex. i stuck my used tampon inside a sour patch kids wrapper and put it in my wastepaper basket because i’m too tired from slaving away at taco hell to get up off my futon and walk to the bathroom and flush it in the toilet. do you think the followills would love me any less? ;)”) that is interesting only to the self-important writers who put them out there for the blogosphere in the hope that they will get noticed by and linked to other self-important blogs. Finally, there was a Q&A with a twenty-five-year-old guy named Duane who spends eight hours a day playing a MMORPG called ZooKwest. His avatar, a half-man, half-wolf warrior named AlphaLupis, is the most powerful in the Kingdom of Animals and has insane orgies with online groupies (“zoopies”) of all sorts of half-and-half permutations of the species. In the “dead world” otherwise known as real life, he’s an aspiring assistant manager at Kinko’s.